Ready, set, goals: Why people are looking to coaches to set down a path for the future?

As workplaces and even life becomes more challenging, people are looking to coaches to help them navigate their current circumstances, and set down a path for the future.

Navi Mumbai resident Sriprakash Krishnan credits executive coach and trainer Priya Kumar with turning his life around. “If I have gone from a sales representative in an MNC to country director and MD of a global food ingredients company in just 10 years, it is only because of Priya,” he says. “She is my mentor. She has helped me fight many of the fears in my career, and achieve a lot. Every major decision that I take today has a little bit of Priya in it.” Krishnan, 43, who has attended many of Kumar’s workshops, and even had one-on-one sessions with her, says: “Priya doesn’t tell me what to do. She just helps me make the right choices.”

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More and more Indians, from CEOs to students, appear to need help with their work and their life, and this has led to an explosion of ‘coaches’ – life coach, executive coach, success coach, lifestyle coach, leadership coach, relationship coach and so on. There is a coach for every challenge, and a mentor who (for a not-so-sma+ll fee) will happily be that voice in your ear as you navigate life. But what explains this profusion of ‘life coaches’? After all, our parents and their parents tackled life without paying someone to guide them through it.

Shiv Khera, the ‘original’ life coach who began his career almost two decades ago as a motivational speaker, says that today everyone needs “somebody to hold their hand”. He says: “We’ve all got digital dementia. We’ve become comfortable with technology, but extremely uncomfortable with people. That’s why you need a life coach; to teach you how to interact and engage with other people again.”

Bengaluru-based Geet Batra, who is a ‘Coach Finder’ for the life coach training institute GrowMore, says that it all comes down to the sheer volume of communication of all kinds that keep coming at us every minute -- from people, or through the media. “Everyone is getting confused by the conflicting nature of these messages. Should I give more time to family or to career? Should I take a vacation or work? Who is going to help you sort these things out?” he asks. Most people, adds Batra, want a non-judgmental sounding board, “but this can’t be your friends and family, because they will always judge. It has to be someone neutral”. Like a life coach.

PHOTO BY DEEPAK TURBHEKAR

Mumbai-based ‘success coach’ Anand Chulani chooses to “work with someone who’s got ‘a growth mindset’, someone who wants to learn and improve. “Even if they’re doing well, they want to do better, and have just the mindset for it,” he adds. Chulani works with cricketers from the IPL team, the Rajasthan Royals, Bollywood stars, and – through his mentor, US coach Anthony Robbins -- international celebs such as Hugh Jackman and Serena Williams. But he is also focussed on working with youngsters – school children and Millennials. “There’s very little difference,” says Chulani. “I meet a 15-year-old kid who says he’s not feeling good enough, and then I’ll coach an Oscar winner who also says that he doesn’t feel good enough either. You get a feeling that you’re broken, but actually there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just running patterns that are not serving you.”

Indeed Chulani — who claims he talked a student from a well-known IB school off the roof of his Juhu apartment building when the youngster was determined to commit suicide — understands the value of catching ‘em young and bolstering their self-esteem early. As a student at UK’s Harrow public school, Chulani says he was routinely bullied and picked on by both the students and the teachers. His confidence took such a beating that it took many years — until he was in college in the US — to recover from his traumatic school days. Chulani now organises special events for teens called Absolute Champion (his own methodology), where he teaches them to “move from being a self-doubter, to an achiever to a champion”.

That is also what Priya Kumar, who works out of Oshiwara, does, except that she largely deals with midlevel and senior corporate executives. At her ‘personal breakthrough’ workshops, Kumar makes participants do seemingly-impossible things, like walk on a 10-foot-long pit of fire or a carpet of glass shards; bend metal rods, or karate-chop through inch-thick boards. “It’s not actually dangerous, otherwise I would be out of a job,” says Kumar. “But when your life is at risk — that’s when you realise what you are capable of. You will never forget the lessons you learned while walking on fire.”

But what do life coaches actually do? And how did sessions with one of them help someone like, say, Guru Majgaonkar, a well-placed senior director at a leading Pune-based software solutions provider? “The job of a life coach is to help clients find answers and not to tell [them what’s right], because these answers will work only when it comes from self-realisation,” says Goa-based Sujit Sumitran, a former senior corporate exec-turned life coach.

Priya Kumar

“I prefer to work with well-functioning individuals who have the desire to discover their latent potential,” says Jayshree Kirtane who was consulted by Majgaonkar, 45. He says it was Kirtane who convinced him that he was ready to move to the next level in his career. “Jayshree helped expand my scope not only within my organisation, but also outside India, by helping me understand my personality. I was complacent in my role, and coaching also helped me get a promotion,” says Majgaonkar.

Majgaonkar is her archetypal client, says Kirtane. “Usually mid to senior management employees in the age bracket of 37 and 42…who have become secure [enough] in their life and career, and start challenging the ways they’ve approached life and its problems so far.” However, a life coach can only be effective if a person opens up to him or her completely, she adds.

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That’s harder when you are a corporate leader or a public figure, and people look to you for answers and inspiration. A stumble at that level can often mean a sharp fall from grace. “It can get very lonely at the top,” says Batra. “The CEO is not comfortable speaking to the CXOs or the directors about his problems. But he would be perfectly happy to speak to a coach. Despite having millions of people around us, we all feel a tiny bit of loneliness, and need someone to speak to.”

Ramon Llamba, who trained in the US and moved back to Gurgaon 10 years ago, agrees. “When I was in the US, every single person had a life coach,” she says. “But when I returned to Gurgaon, most people thought I was a psychologist or psychiatrist. Now they understand what a mentor or life coach is, and the idea has caught on, not only with top professionals and businessmen, but also with homemakers and students. I have also been coaching several doctors who work under high levels of stress and feel the need to manage their lives better.” Jasmin Waldmann, a German national who moved to India to become a life and wellness coach, has even had clients from the modelling and fashion world who come to her for everything, from weight loss to ‘mind transformation’, and entrepreneurs who want to get better at their work. “A life coach is no longer just a fancy thing. And some celebrities, by publicly acknowledging their mentors, have sent out a message that its ok, even cool, to have a coach.”

Jayshree Kirtane

Most coaches inevitably gravitate towards corporate training, which brings in the big bucks. “Today, it has been understood that each level of the corporate ladder demands a different level of skills and capabilities. Strategies and tactics also need tweaking and enhancing from time to time — especially where chaos and disruption have become the norm,” says Bengaluru-based life coach Ian Faria. Late last year Vijaya Annapurna, a senior manager with a prominent electronics firm, sought Faria out after she felt “stuck” in her professional life and needed help. Faria’s company, Talk Temple, trains staffers in various sectors, including start-ups. He worked with Annapurna for seven months, helping her with her listening skills, as well as cultivating empathy and better communication. At work, that meant an improved relationship with her direct reportees, which “brought greater transparency in the team” and helped her become a mentor herself for others.

As the tribe of life coaches grows, so does their approach and MO. Priya Kumar used to take participants of her workshops outdoors, for adventure sports and team-building exercises, but now her signature-style is experiential learning. “When I started, I would conduct outdoor activities and adventure sports, and encourage participants to decipher their learnings from these. But later I moved indoors to conduct personal-breakthrough workshops, which means I put your life at stake (though not literally) to create those life-changing lessons that will stay with you forever,” she says. Ramon Llamba, too prefers experiential learning, and says: “My workshops are not based on gyan but help [people] identify how they became who they are. The emphasis is more on experience and transformation rather than motivation, because motivation fades in a few days.”

Jayshree Kirtane relies on the FIRO-B (Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behaviour), a trademarked test that originated from the need to understand and predict how high-performance military teams would work together during World War II, and her style of gentle sarcasm mixed in with humour and pop-culture references (she often addresses leaders as ‘Thalaiva’ as an nod to actor Rajnikanth) has gone down well with her clients. Sujit Sumitran’s TheChangeThatStays model, helps to debunk “unconscious beliefs” like “bosses think they have all the answers, and subordinates think what their bosses say, must be right.” Sumitran mentors mostly over phone because “most people don’t have time (to spare)”.

Ready, set, goals

Almost all life coaches do a mix of things. And while corporate training or group coaching (with a smaller number of executives or CXOs) is the most lucrative, one-on-one sessions are becoming more popular, says Waldmann. “The client knows the coach’s entire focus is on him or her. And it comes with a lot of confidentiality, which most clients prefer,” she says, adding that sessions could cost anywhere between Rs 7,000 to Rs 20,000 a sitting. Llamba, who started with corporate sessions has, in the last three years, moved to specialised one-on-one sessions. She coaches seven or eight mentees a day, charging between Rs 40,000 and 50,000 for a number of sessions together.

The perceived demand and the highprofile nature of the job is now attracting people in large numbers, says Waldmann, who receives queries from at least two or three people every month asking how they can become a life coach. And it looks like anyone can. Chulani was a stand-up coming and screenwriter in Hollywood; Kirtane taught mathematics at management schools for the first 10 years of her work life, and Llamba has a PhD in quantum physics. But while getting a certification from the Indian Coaching Federation might be a good starting point, in an industry that runs on recommendation hardly anyone checks qualifications. That is the problem, says Khera. “There are many fly-by-night operatives today who want to make a fortune off other people’s problems and misery,” says Khera. “So when selecting a life coach, make sure you pick the right people to lift you up. Otherwise they will only push you down further.”